Decision at the Crossroads of Losing Innocence to Evil

I doubt leisure is the gift given old age.

It seems the river Song runs swifter now.

Still I do seek to fish from the flow

Lyrics that break all barriers.

My body may have turned to an ash heap of pains,

Yet I poke at the smothered ambers

To sometimes stoke a fire again.

My mind is ever warmed by its glow,

This strange simmering of words called poetry.

Meditation Upon One Thought in Rabindranath Tagore’s. “The Gift”

-- Larry Eugene Meredith (2009)

I have friends who spent years nagging me to commit my worthless life to paper, perhaps to make it easy to burn. I don't know? 

I said forever I would do no such thing. It is blatantly egotistical. Is it not bordering on the tawdry? It smacks of being showy and tasteless like standing on the street tooting a horn and yelling "look at me, look at me".

Then I remembered I'm a guy who once wore orange Flag-Flyers

so it wouldn't be the first time I was tasteless and showy. And I obviously didn’t snap on orange shoes to fade into the background.

So instead I told everyone it was unnecessary. I have been a writer since age 12, read my stories and you’ll know my life, no need to make it formal.

This is really a lie, of course. Every writer becomes a character

somewhere in what he or she writes, but even in the most autobiographical of fictions it is still fiction. It may be close to the actuality, but there is a nip or a tuck here or there to make it fit the plot. After all, the main character in my short tale “Ground Dog Day” was an eight-year old girl named Jenny, not a boy named Larry. And speaking of standing and tooting a horn, that real boy Larry never borrowed a trumpet to blast notes down a Groundhog hole as fictional Jenny did, although the rest of that story is pretty factual.

Thus I gave in and am penning (are we still allowed to say, “pen”) my minor life, and even worse putting it out in the Blogosphere before prying eyes. 

I gave this endeavor a title, Impressions of My Life, because that is all we have of ourselves -- impressions.

I am in my mid-seventies. My memory is tattered and torn. Perhaps what I recall differs from what others remember. Much of my early years are hearsay, but even where I was an active participant and witness to events of my own living that I can remember, I only see them through these two eyes. Maybe if I saw my life through different eyes from a different spot I would appear a different person.

Although my posting have titles, they are actually snipped and sewn together parts of chapters. I have posted these chapters so far:

1      Beginning of Me

2      Downingtown the First Time

3      Swamp Rat

The chapter currently being posted piecemeal is called “Lost Innocence” The next three chapters are “Into the Weeds”, “Sex and the System” and “Gates of Hormone Hell”. You can see this will rapidly move from my losing my childhood innocence to gaining an evil teenage mind. I make no apologies for what I will write. I am not a perfect person, far from it. I am a much-flawed individual.

I will say I hold no grudges and hate no one. If in the course of telling my life I give unflattering portraits of those I’ve known it is not out of malice.

However, since there may be some negativity concerning others I have been brought to a decision crossroads. What should I include? Should I censor out certain occurrences? Maybe I should only tell the cutesy things or the funny things and not the darker ones? Should I use real names or substitute pseudonyms? A lot of the people from my life are dead, but not all and of those who have passed on, they have friends and relatives who knew them and might have seen them in a better light than I. (Perhaps a worse light, too.) The goal

here is to tell my life as truthfully as I can, not to offend anyone unlucky enough to have shared it, although I promise, the most unflattering character who will appear in these posts will most certainly be me.

What I did in my youth is past. I cannot change it. I don’t care to lie about it. I wasn’t a Christian until I was 34 years old. I don’t think those who knew me before then would have said I was a bad guy, but they didn’t know everything about me and what was in my head. They don’t know just how much about me changed when I became a Christian.

I believe here in my dotage I’m a better person than I ever was before,

but I still fall short on God’s measuring stick. God’s forgiven me; I hope you can.

Now What do I include from here?

There are places I Remember

All my life, though some have changed

Some forever not for better

Some have gone and some remain

All these places have their moments

In My Life

--John Lennon & Paul McCartney